Video of my keynote lecture at Eurosla'13 is online

Here is a link to my EUROSLA'13 keynote lecture "What can computational modelling tell us about second language acquisition"

Abstract: While there is a thriving literature on computational modelling of first language acquisition, the field of second language acquisition has hardly been computationally investigated. In this talk I will argue that computational models have much to offer to second language learning. I will illustrate this with a relatively simple usage-based model of language that has been widely studied during the last couple of decades. This model learns how to produce new utterances by combining fragments from a corpus of structures of previously heard utterances in the most probable way. I will show how such an approach can deal with some phenomena in second language learning, and how it can explain so-called interlanguage fossilization.  I will argue that second language learning can be understood in terms of the interference between (combinations of fragments from) previous L1-experiences and new L2-experiences. In such a perspective the difference between L1 and L2 becomes a fluid one.